Walking Wounded
by Jessica Knorr
Summary: Wesley reflects on anything, and everything


Walking Wounded

© Jessica Knorr, 2001

[slayer_2000_@hotmail.com][1]

[www.geocities.com/Area51/Quadrant/6706/][2]

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RATING: PG 13

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SPOILERS: "_Graduation_", "_Parting Gifts_" to "_Reprise_", possibly the entire '_Angel_' series(hints of Doyleness!).

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CONTENT: This ain't gonna be as bad as "_Obsession_". Wesley doesn't think like that! Right? Subtle allusions to drinking. I suck at songfics. 

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SUMMARY: Thinking Wesley songfic. Deals with Boy Wonder's musings about Angel, getting shot, the rest of the AI trinity, his friends' fallen comrade, the past and what the future holds.

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DISCLAIMER: Wesley, Angel, Cordelia, Doyle, Gunn, the Watchers' Council, Giles, Buffy, et cetera belong to "God, The Devil and Joss" Whedon and the WB. I'm having fun with angsty thinking fics. The gunshot just inspired Muse for some reason, crappy as this turned out. Song is "_All My Friends_", from Our Lady Peace's "_Spiritual Machines_" disc(which is absolutely great and what you totally have to buy, besides the Matthew Good Band's "_Beautiful Midnight_"!!!).

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NOTES: For Jess. She deserves it, because I'm always badmouthing Wuss-er, Wesley.

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All my friends

Alone on a hill

They're just looking down

With violent minds out on loan

They're just not equipped

I was young, when I went to Sunnydale. Barely legal American drinking age, fresh from two years at Oxford. My father pulled me out because 'it was my time'. I was always a good boy. I was using the loo by a year and a half, walking, talking, reading and eating solids in less. I did everything my father and the professors in the Council told me to do. But, apparently, Wesley Whyndym-Pryce was still not good enough for any of them.

Giles, Buffy, Faith and their friends promptly labeled me 'simple'. Cordelia, the radiant Miss Chase, thought I was God. Well, not _God_…perhaps Eros, or that Leonardo chap. But by golly, she was the only one who didn't treat me like a nuisance. I tried hard to be useful, to 'fit in', but, in the end, became a mockery and something to be forgotten. I left America after I was let out of the hospital, hopefully never to return. I was wrong.

Those bastards threw me out. My father practically disowned me. My mother helped me find a flat in the suburbs and all was peaceful at first, working with my cousin at the _Sun_, but they found me again and would not give me a minute's rest. So I came back to California. Actually, first, I contacted a friend of a friend in England who had demon books and fighting tools galore, and then went in search of a new job in probably the only field I can every really feel at home in: demon fighting.

I approached Angel, and again he, and now Cordelia, laughed. I admit the leather pants were foolish, and uncomfortable to say the least. Once more I made attempts to be useful. Apparently, they seemed to be better than my previous year's advances. We built a name for ourselves, Angel Investigations, helping the hopeless and working to save souls, including our cohort's. And while this one lasted longer, my second job, like the first, was doomed to fail.

Now, six weeks after Angel fired Cordelia, Gunn and I, I am sitting in my LA apartment with a bullet in my gut. I feel like crap. I wish I could really get smashed, but, alas, Virginia took away all my alcohol.

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Insistence

We hope for the best

We're not making sense

In silence wait the day

When you're better than

Sometimes, I wonder what could have happened if I'd just done what Giles had done and given the Council and my father the finger and walked away. Would I have continued in Oxford, gotten my degree and become a teacher? Met and married a wonderful substitute teacher one slow night and bore her a son and a daughter? Have her divorce me as I succumbed to the ravages of stress, age and modern life and died in a dark, cold London street corner, drunk on paper bag liquor? Now that I think of it, I'm glad I followed my father's wishes. I'm in love with a wonderful woman, I have friends who love me and a job that is very rewarding. Sometimes. If you overlook the death you face every night and the fact that it doesn't pay well. When it does pay, it's good, because usually Cordelia charges them twice as much as she said. Bills to pay off and livings to make is guilty-free reason enough. 

I occasionally wonder how Angel is, even though I don't let on. I got fed up with his obsession with his sire rising again, but one can't help but think. He was truly teetering on a dangerously high edge and coming close to snapped last we saw him. I hope he is all right. Cordelia told me, before she became cold to the subject, that he would eventually snap to his senses and invite us back. I hope she's right, and that she will want to go back. Now that I think of it, I wonder how Giles and the others in Sunnydale are. Last we talked was before Faith sent herself to prison. It'd be nice to get back in touch, if only with Giles. I hope that Buffy, Willow, Xander and any other new friends they might have made are fending off college and demons well. We're all still here, so I'm guessing they're doing a good job.

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In this silence

I'm not buying

You're not faking

You're not

Guess we better hold out

Again

This time, we won't understand again

I'm not waiting for some sense

This time

We won't understand again

I'm not waiting for…

A subject I also don't care to bring up with Cordelia is her lost friend, Doyle, whom I can't help but feel that I've replaced sometimes. Never met the fellow, but at the old office, occasionally we'd have a long night and I'd hear Cordelia calling his name in her sleep when she was collapsed on the desk. A video came out of Angel's bookcase when I was exploring the tomes and I took it back here and watched it. Good looking Irishman. I would have liked to have known him…. On the tape, he and Cordelia were bickering back and forth. Perhaps, at first, she did not find him at all interesting. He would have suffered through something like my so-called Sunnydale Syndrome. We might have been good friends, had he not have died to save Cordy and Angel. Honor and audacity in a friend like that can never be forgotten.

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Still they sit

Alone on a hill

Their mechanical thoughts

Have left them out on their own

They're not buying this

In this silence

I'm not buying

You're not faking

You're not

Guess we better hold out

Again

This time, we won't understand again

I'm not waiting for some sense

This time

We won't understand again

I'm not waiting for…

The ceiling must get awful tired of me sitting here, night after night, talking to it. Sometimes I'm in my right mind. Sometimes I'm so far out on painkillers that Virginia tells me I say there's a man in the stucco patterns who carries on debates with me whether there are green, fuzzy panda bears in Heaven and whether they're happy or intensely angry at the world. Where this comes, I'm not sure. Maybe this job _is_ getting to me.

What will the future hold? I silently ask that imaginary man in the ceiling. Will Cordelia, Gunn and I continue to be a team, to fight the evil and darkness in this city and the world? Will Angel join us again and bring meaning to the name Angel Investigations? Will he reach his shansu or will Apocolypse come before? When? All great, confusing questions best reserved for talks with God weekly at the chapel down the road. Or, perhaps, I should seek out a swami or a Council prophet. Maybe they're just best left for destiny to provide answers for. We've all just began healing, myself physically, Cordelia mentally, and Angel, especially, spiritually.

   [1]: mailto:slayer_2000_@hotmail.com
   [2]: http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Quadrant/6706/



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